A Show of Emotion

Issue No. 3/2018 A Show of Emotion Interview by Gill Crabbe, FNG Research As the Sinebrychoff Art Museum prepares to stage an exhibition on painting and the theatre, Gill Crabbe meets the show’s curator Laura Gutman, to discuss the research she carried out in order to bring this topic to life Meeting the independent curator Laura Gutman is like meeting a detective. As curator of several shows in Finland, where she moved from Paris 17 years ago, including the recent acclaimed ‘Air de Paris’ exhibition at Helsinki Art Museum (HAM), she has used her research skills and background studying art history under Guy Cogeval at the Ecole du Louvre in Paris in the 1990s to impressive effect in Finland. Not only has she been making intriguing connections between Finnish artists and their European counterparts, but also deepening understanding of European artworks in Finnish collections. It is a busy year for Gutman as she is now in the final stages of preparing a show on theatre and painting from the 17th to early 20th centuries titled ‘Moved to Tears: Staging Emotions’ at the Sinebrychoff Art Museum in Helsinki. The museum is an appropriate setting for such a subject as it is the house of the collector Paul Sinebrychoff, whose wife Fanny Grahn was herself an actress, and their rooms on the first floor are laid out almost as a series of theatrical sets, each reflecting a period from his collection. The theme of the Sinebrychoff exhibition which is held in the galleries on the ground floor, is also a subject close to Gutman’s heart, since at the Ecole du Louvre she studied the theoretical and philosophical background to painting and theatre ‘from David to Degas’. After having attended a performance in Helsinki with Finnish singer Minna Nyberg, she has developed a particular interest in the use of Baroque gesture in the fine arts. ‘With Baroque gesture, you are not supposed to have emotions or show them. You are a vehicle for emotions, the bienséance (correct behaviour) means you keep emotions inside and use instead this “mute Louis Lagrenée the Elder, Pygmalion and His Statue, 1777, eloquence”. Racine’s theatre deals with human passions, oil on canvas, 104cm x 86cm and still you express emotion using codified gestures,’ Antell Collections, Finnish National Gallery / Sinebrychoff Art Museum Gutman explains. An important philosophical backdrop Photo: Finnish National Gallery / Antti Kuivalainen to the theme is Descartes 1649 treatise Passions of the 2 A Show of Emotion // Gill Crabbe --- FNG Research Issue No. 3/2018. Publisher: Finnish National Gallery, Kaivokatu 2, FI-00100 Helsinki, FINLAND. © All rights reserved by the author and the publisher. Originally published in https://research.fng.fi Soul which defined and categorised the emotions. Then Charles Le Brun, the great art theorist and Court Painter to Louis XIV, created a series of facial features expressing different passions, or emotions. ‘These models (Les Expressions des passions de l’âme, published in 1727) were used in all European art academies during the 18th and 19th centuries,’ says Gutman. ‘The codes were used in singing, theatre, painting, even by lawyers and in the priesthood. This rhetoric would have been familiar to the audiences throughout these periods.’ Gutman’s approach to curating this show is widely research based, and her method emphasises a narrative approach that emerges from following visual clues in the artworks she encounters. ‘I began my research looking at Finnish collections and then in the process noticing what was resonating with the great models. I have been working visually and then I conducted research, reading biographies and articles on painting and theatre history to find connections with the clues from the paintings. I also keep updated with the state-of-the-art research in France, listening to France Culture podcasts. I ordered two books after hearing about them on the radio, Les Figures du ravissement, by Marianne Massin, and Représenter la vision, by Guillaume Cassegrain, when preparing the exhibition.’ ‘When I had just moved to Finland and first saw Albert Edelfeldt’s The Burnt Village (1879), I realised that the same themes that I had studied in Paris were to be found among artists here in Finland,’ she continues. ‘So my research for this show has used the theoretical frame I had studied in Paris to explore what works were following the same patterns.’ The Burnt Village, which will be shown in the exhibition, depicts villagers hiding behind a rock, with an empty expanse of snow receding to the background, where you see their village burning and soldiers. ‘The composition of this painting is typical of an introduction to something that would have been happening on the stage,’ says Gutman. ‘The space in the painting tells you that time is an element. It has similarities to a painting by Léon Cogniet The Massacre of the Innocents (1824), which shows a biblical scene with a woman and her baby behind a wall, hiding from the terrible action. You fear for them, and this emotional aspect is exactly what Cogniet had been drawing from theatre, the melodramatic feeling that the audience will be experiencing.’ On Stage The exhibition presents works from the Finnish National Gallery from the European canon, as well as loans from other Finnish museums, and groups them into rooms with sub-themes, such as ‘Apparitions’, ‘Delight’, ‘Glory and Death’ and ‘Terror and Fury’. Here Gutman has opted for works demonstrating a strong porosity between theatre and painting. One of the advantages of staging theme-based shows is the chance it offers to restore lesser-known artworks that might not otherwise be selected for display. Several works have been conserved specially for the exhibition, among them Charles Benazech’s Poacher released (1778), chosen to show the invention of the ‘fourth wall’ in the late 18th century. The themed approach also allows intriguing juxtapositions, says Gutman, that encourage the visitor to see paintings they think they might already know, in a fresh light. ‘What I like to do is to create a strong narrative – I want to take the audience by the hand and let them discover by themselves certain developments. Extended labels come second, to open up the context. So in the room with the theme “Apparitions’’, when you see a painting with sky opening and a Greek goddess descending (Pygmalion and his Statue, 1777, by Louis Lagrenée), next to a painting with sky opening and the god Ukko appearing (Lemminkäinen at the Fiery Lake, c. 1867, by Robert Wilhelm Ekman), and a biblical scene (Elijah Carried off in the Chariot of Fire, turn of the 16th century, by Jacopo Palma il Giovane) then you start to see the development of the Deus ex machina, a traditional theatrical spectacle where the gods come on stage through the sky, leading to an unforeseen ending to the story. The audience can understand the theme visually and look at the works individually and see how a surprise is created by actors on a stage and how this is conveyed in the painting. This exhibition is about how we learn about theatre from looking at paintings, and how paintings were influenced by theatre.’ 3 A Show of Emotion // Gill Crabbe --- FNG Research Issue No. 3/2018. Publisher: Finnish National Gallery, Kaivokatu 2, FI-00100 Helsinki, FINLAND. © All rights reserved by the author and the publisher. Originally published in https://research.fng.fi Anton Raphael Mengs, Joseph’s Dream, undated, oil on canvas, 120cm x 85cm The Göhle Collection, Finnish National Gallery / Sinebrychoff Art Museum Photo: Finnish National Gallery / Henri Tuomi Gutman’s investigations into the Finnish collections have uncovered their own surprises too. Researching the theme in the late 18th century around the time of the French Revolution, she was looking for works signalling the influences of key thinkers of the period such as Diderot and artists such as David. ‘When I came across Joseph’s Dream I thought this is so similar to David’s Brutus (1789). But then I realised it was painted by Mengs before David’s Brutus. David had met with Mengs in Rome and might have seen his Joseph plunged into the darkness before creating his own Brutus.’ Brutus is such a key moment in the meeting between theatre and painting because the theme of the tragic hero who carries out his duty at the cost of sacrificing his own sons, was also performed on stage during the Revolution era. ‘David was close to the French actor Talma, who played Brutus on stage, and advised him on his costume. Talma rejected the court wig and played dressed as a Roman, which was a great move towards the use of historical costume. David’s painting was so popular that the actors used it to recreate the composition on stage, and they froze in the same position for a moment, to much acclaim. David’s tutor was Sedaine, a dramatist whose salon was popular among actors, so David is pivotal between theatre and art.’ A key work in the show is Lagrenée’s Pygmalion and his Statue (1777) and Gutman had chosen it initially to illustrate the development of the theme of Deus ex machina. ‘I could not imagine Diderot was behind it,’ she explains. ‘Through reading Victor I. Stoichita’s The Pygmalion Effect. From Ovid to Hitchcock (2008), I discovered that Pygmalion and Galatea was a theme favoured by the Enlightenment. The depiction of all the variety of emotions brought by a sudden turn of events was what Diderot promoted. Figures turn towards each other 4 A Show of Emotion // Gill Crabbe --- FNG Research Issue No. 3/2018. Publisher: Finnish National Gallery, Kaivokatu 2, FI-00100 Helsinki, FINLAND.

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